


Legacies

by Kahvi



Category: Blackwell Series (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-09 01:46:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8870953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kahvi/pseuds/Kahvi
Summary: Living is harder than you'd imagine when you've been dead far longer than you've been alive. You could say it's a work in progress, for Joey.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Khantael](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khantael/gifts).



“Joey?” Lauren stepped out of her bedroom, eyes red and dazed, and it took him a while to realize it came from lack of sleep, not anything else. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but neither was she dealing all that well with… well… him. 

“What; no ‘hey, asshole’? Things are looking up!” 

“You’re still an asshole,” she said, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Thanks. What about?” 

“Just… things.”

“I love it when you get specific.” 

“I mean… I didn’t think I’d ever have kids…” 

“Hey now!” Joey knew that look on her face, he realized. He’d seen it before. Twice. “What kind of talk is that…”

“But that was by choice, you know? My choice. I could always change my mind if I wanted to, and that’s a luxury I don’t have anymore. No way in hell am I having kids if there’s any risk of them ending up having to deal with this.”

“With what,” he said, in the way you ask a person standing on the railings of the Hudson Bridge if anything is wrong. Lauren looked at him then, met his eyes for the first time in a good long while, and she didn’t have to say it but she did. 

“You.” 

 

The dreams surprised me. Not just what they were about, but that I was having them at all. I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting, after all, I’ve been dead far longer than I’ve ever been alive. Still, knowing how to live doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d be likely to forget. I’d say it was like riding a bicycle, but seeing as how riding a bike is part of that whole general ‘living’ thing, I’m not sure the comparison works. And anyway, I never took the time to learn. 

Turns out it’s fairly easy, once you get the hang of keeping your feet on the pedals, and you don’t get overly confident in traffic. If being dead for eighty odd years has taught me anything, it’s patience. That, and investigating deaths pretty much non-stop those same eighty years, which would be enough to make anyone obsessed with personal safety. Not that I’m obsessed, I’m just not going skydiving any time soon. Hell, just crossing the street on foot anywhere in Manhattan is enough of a thrill for someone not used to being corporeal. I don’t figure cars these days are all that much faster than they were the last time I had a body to be hit by them, not downtown at any rate, but there sure are a lot more of them to go around. I sometimes wonder if I should get one myself, but there doesn’t seem to be much point. Being able to go wherever I want is still a novelty, and not an entirely comfortable one. I get… stuck. And that’s fine.

Despite what I just said, in all the ways that matter to me right now, the city is safe. I could do with a bit more of safe. 

 

“You’re serious? You’re bringing a kid into this place?”

Lauren lit another cigarette and took a long, grateful drag. Joey wondered why she didn’t just use the old one to light the new, so she could smoke continuously. That seemed to be what she was going for. “She can have the bedroom; I’ll sleep on the couch. Not like I have any privacy, anyway.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“She’s family.”

Even Joey knew when to shut up, sometimes. Even if he had been dumb enough to want to say something, the look Lauren was sending him from across the room would have stopped him. Hell, if she kept it up much longer, it’d probably knock him straight into the afterlife. Maybe he should let her. 

“Her name is Rosangela. She’s five years old.” 

“Well above the legal age for ghost hunting, then. I take it all back.” 

“That’s not going to be a problem.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.” 

“Sweetheart…” he began, but didn’t finish. Even Joey knew when to shut up, sometimes.

 

I forget, during the day. It took me a while to figure that out, mostly because I hardly slept those first few nights. Oh, I got tired, just like I got hungry and thirsty and had to use the bathroom - that one I couldn’t ignore - but sleep was so easy to dismiss and so hard to get back in the habit of. I’d never needed much of it, and was a light sleeper at that, so with every bodily sensation back in full force and begging for attention… No wonder all I could do was just lay there, on Red’s ratty old couch, staring at the ceiling stained from someone else’s cigarettes and jumping every time a fly landed on my face, or legs, or twitching fingers. 

No one seemed to question my being there; with Nishanti gone, none of the neighbors probably even remembered who was supposed to be living in this place. I’d seen Red pay the rent often enough to manage the process myself, and I know all the passwords to her accounts for the same reason. Her credit cards were still in their usual spot, and I know what numbers to dial and words to type on the keyboard to get food delivered; all of that stuff was much easier than riding a bike. 

I waited a good few weeks before I got cash out of one of those automatic teller machines, though. I guess it felt more like stealing when the cold, hard cash was in my hands. Hell, anything felt wrong in my hands. They weren’t used to touching anything but myself. 

Anyway, the dreams. Thinking about them is hard, like they want to slip away from me. Like I’m not supposed to remember. I wake up gasping, eyes wide open like in some stupid melodrama; right then, it feels like I was just _there_ , that _this_ is the dream and I should be somewhere else. Maybe that’s it; maybe what Red did set me off kilter, and now my mind can’t figure out where I’m supposed to fit. By the time I’ve staggered into the bathroom and splashed water on my face, again like I’m in some cheap matiné performance, it’s already starting to fade. That’s why I’m starting to write them down. 

I’ve got to do something. One day, the dreams will stop, and then what?

 

“Listen lady; I don’t like this any more than you do, but you have got to stop pretending like I’m not here!” 

Nothing. Not so much as a flinch; she just kept walking down the street with her arms clenched around two brown paper bags, and her teeth no doubt the same beneath perfectly painted lips. It was probably Joey’s imagination, but the color seemed to go one shade darker each day he’d been here. If she kept this up, they’d look like plump black cherries by the end of the month. 

“I know you can see me. All right? And I definitely know you can hear me, or you wouldn’t be walking along the road like this when you have a perfectly serviceable car. Or at least I think that’s what that red, boxy thing is.”

She turned a corner, delicately, heels unheard in the noise of traffic, but Joey felt them anyway. Click. Clack. Like a swinging pendulum. 

“You can’t drown me out. It doesn’t work that way. Just like you can’t run away from me or shut me out. You’re stuck with me; I’m stuck with you.” 

They were three blocks away from the grocery store by now, and to his chagrin Joey realized she was determined to walk the whole way back to her apartment. Was she just going to leave the car? Apparently. 

“You can’t keep doing this,” he yelled, knowing volume was not the problem, but rapidly running out of options. “If you keep at it, we’ll both go crazy. Don’t you see that?” 

Click. Clack. All the way home. 

 

It’s turning into book. I didn’t use to think I was much of a writer, but maybe hanging around Red for so long, something rubbed off on me. It’d probably go faster if I could type it up on the computer; it’s not like I’ve never used a typewriter, and I’m getting better and better at clicking around at things. It just… it’s like the money; it doesn’t feel real unless I’m holding it in my hand. So I get these pads of flimsy lined paper down at the dollar store; I figure, I run through them so quickly there’s no point in buying quality. Used to be you could pay people to type up manuscripts for you. I wonder if that’s still the case. Even if it was, I’m running low on cash, and I don’t want the bank to start asking too many questions. 

Do people still need tailors? You wouldn’t think so, what with cheap clothes everywhere, but I’ve noticed signs here and there around town. How different can a sewing machine be these days? Hell, if I can figure out computers… 

First thing tomorrow, I’m going to take some cash out and take it across the street, open up an account in my own name. If I’m going to start getting paychecks, I need somewhere to deposit them. It’s about time I started working to put food on the table. 

 

Tuesday was meatloaf day. It wasn’t noticeably different in any other way, but at least there was that. It was about the only way Joey had figured out to tell time in this place - the hours were easy enough, there were clocks everywhere - but for the days, he relied on the menu. 

Tuesdays were meatloaf. Mondays, they got soup. Well, he didn’t, but it was fun to pretend. Friday was fish. Joey didn’t know much about fish, but the stuff they served here was white and flakey and came with a yellowish-white sauce. He had no idea what it smelled like, of course, but he felt like he could remember the scent. Saturday was usually some sort of stew, but now and then they’d mix it up with spaghetti and meatballs. Thursday was macaroni and cheese. Wednesday was chicken. And on Sunday, they got what was laughably called a roast; a mostly grey slab of unnamed meat, charred at the edges and served with a cold, fried tomato and two forlorn potatoes. 

Lauren didn’t eat, most of the time, so why they kept bringing the food was anyone’s guess. When they were trying to balance out her dosage, some days she would sit down and peck at a carrot or a piece of pasta, getting a few fork or spoonfuls down before she either lost interest or started screaming. Either way, they put her to bed and got her back on the IV. 

For Thanksgiving, they got turkey, which took them all the way through December, where, briefly, around the 25th, strings of white lights appeared in the corridors. Or corridor, rather; Joey couldn’t get much further down than to the reception area, and he knew this place was bigger than that. He’d seen it when they came in, though he wasn’t paying much attention at the time; a vast, concrete block reaching on and on into a darkening sky. For all he knew, there was a Christmas tree somewhere. There had to be, when you thought about it. But Joey didn’t like to think about it. 

There’s a bar around the corner. Hell, there are at least half a dozen, but there’s one in particular that I like. Now that I’ve got money coming in, I have to see about getting it out, too. Life, you know. Learning to ride a bike again. 

Anyway, there’s a girl who moved into Nishanti’s old place, and she keeps making eyes at me. She’s pretty enough, in a friendly sort of way; dark skin and eyes, bleached blonde hair that makes her face look rather striking. I feel like telling her I’m at least three times her age, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s really true. I saw her going to this place, so I figured I’d start going too. I haven’t asked her to join me yet. I figure, times have changed; chances are she’ll ask me to join her, if she’s really interested. I see her there, sometimes, laughing with a group of friends I think are mostly girls, all dressed in soft pastels and well-cut jackets, drinking beer from small bottles with funny labels. When she looks at me, I look away. 

The only one I really talk to when I’m there is the bartender, which I guess is why I let him take me home one night I got too drunk to know better. That was a mistake. Danny and I never did much beyond talking, and the one time we did was the night before he… 

Maybe it’s better I don’t remember. I sit in Red’s chair and stare at the bedroom door - I could never go in there when she… when I was dead, and there’s no way I’m going there now. I can’t keep sleeping on the couch. I can’t stay here. 

There’s a reason why people die when they do. You’d think I’d have figured that out by now; one person can’t hold the memories of so many lifetimes. That’s why it’s all fading. That’s my second chance, Rosa’s gift to me - not this body, not another 80 or so years of life, if I’m lucky - the chance to forget. 

I think I’ll stop writing, for now. Stop reading, too. Until I find a place where everything around me doesn’t remind me of what I’ve lost. Maybe then, a few years from now, I’ll open up those books and they’ll just be stories. I think I’ll get a cat. I like cats. I can’t remember if I always did, or if that’s new, like the girl in Nishanti’s old apartment. I suppose it doesn’t matter. 

One last dream. I keep having it, not like the others, which come and go. I think… I think I want to remember this one. 

 

“Hey, kid.” 

She looked a lot smaller in here, and she wasn’t all that big to begin with. She was hugging her knees, her mess of wild, red curls running down over her arms and covering her face. Of course, she couldn’t hear him. Joey kept talking anyway. 

“I know you can’t see me, and I hope you never will, but I want you to know…” 

The screams from outside their little hiding place were growing more desperate. Joey’s hands weren’t really hands any more than his ears were really ears, and covering one with the other wouldn’t stop the madness. He winced at the word. 

“Things are really scary right now, but I’ll stay here with you as long as I can. Your aunt…”

Something loud and fragile hit the door, and little Rosa yelped. 

“Your aunt,” Joey said, steadily, “loves you very much. She might not be around anymore after this, but she’ll never forget you.” 

His hands weren’t really hands, sure, but they fit around that small body even so. Joey closed his eyes and held her tightly and invisibly, until the noises stopped and the doors were opened, and someone lifted her straight out of him. But until then he remained, whispering to her, softly. 

“I won’t forget you, kid. I’ll never forget.”


End file.
